Footprint Network Blog

The Natural Step, an international non-profit dedicated to education, advisory work and research in sustainable development, has joined Global Footprint Network as a Partner. The Natural Step Framework provides a comprehensive, science-based definition of sustainability and links it to real world applications.

A recent issue of Ecological Economics (Vol. 68, Issue 7), the journal of the International Society of Ecological Economics, features a special section on Ecological Footprint analysis. Edited by Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel, the issue focuses on advancements in Footprint methodology and includes articles by Global Footprint Network research staff and partners. Aticles include a proposed method for incorporating methane into Ecological Footprint analysis, a comparison of Ecological Footprint and water footprint analysis, and a research agenda for improving the National Footprint Accounts. Click here to see a preview of the issue.

Costa Rica tops the list of countries able to provide long and happy lives for its citizens on a low Ecological Footprint, according to the Happy Planet Index, released this month by nef (the new economics foundation), a Global Footprint Network partner. Created as an alternative yardstick to economic-growth based measures of social progress, the Happy Planet Index (HPI) is designed to measure the ecological efficiency with which countries provide a high quality of life for their citizens.

Environmentalist Peter Seidel, who has authored two non-fiction books dealing with human demand on nature, takes a different approach for exploring the consequences of ecological consumption with a new novel out in paperback, 2045: A Vision of Our Future.

At recent workshops in Lima and Bogota, Global Footprint Network explored the implications of ecological limits and biocapacity for the global climate negotiations at Copenhagen and beyond. The workshops were part of multi-day seminars on climate change organized by the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and sponsored by the British Foreign Commonwealth Office.

How can we move beyond measuring economic expansion to broader indicators of progress that assess whether countries are providing for human well-being in a meaningful and lasting way? This question is the focus of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress created by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and chaired by Nobel Prize winning-economists Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Professor Amartya Sen of Harvard.

With Earth Overshoot Day rapidly approaching, Global Footprint Network has launched a Twitter campaign to raise public awareness of ecological overshoot and encourage people to take action to end it. The campaign sends mini text and email messages, or “tweets,” with daily news, facts, suggestions and thought-provoking ideas. The campaign is designed to reach out to the nearly 14 million Twitter users, largely representing the under-35 demographic – the heirs to our current environmental policies and mounting ecological debt.

Later this month, Global Footprint Network will release its 2009 National Footprint Accounts, with the latest data on the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity of over 100 nations and humanity as a whole.

EcosSistemas, a Brazil-based environmental consulting firm, has embraced the Ecological Footprint as a tool uniquely suited to a rising concern: how to manage competing demands on Brazil’s lush, but increasingly pressured, biocapacity.

What can a hyper-industrialized nation with one of the most resource-intensive economies in the world do to cut its Ecological Footprint? Recently, Global Footprint Network and researchers from the United Arab Emirates began a project to test scenarios for policies to cut the UAE’s per capita Ecological Footprint, currently the highest in the world.